Activities are a prominent characteristic of a workplace, typically governed by people's job roles and work responsibilities. Examples of workplace activities include organizing a conference, purchasing equipment, managing candidate interviews, tracking customer leads, managing customer issues, managing software bugs, filing/approving expense reports, and so on. An activity can be viewed as a collaborative work practice involving a set of people, each playing a different role in the activity, for example.
Although emails are an integral part of workplace communication, current email clients generally offer less than adequate support for activity-oriented use of email. For example, email-based discussions may become split across long email threads and communications about multiple activities may become intermixed, leading to difficulties in managing the activities.